Asian regionalism: How does it compare to Europe’s?

(h/t to Gen)

Al Gore’s Personal Energy Use Is His Own “Inconvenient Truth”

What’s really annoying about these sensationalized news bites is that they’re just that – sensationalized.  It talks about energy totals, but there’s no mention about the more important factor – energy source. If even 10kWh is from solar power, than I’m willing to bet that’s better than all of ours combined!  Then there’s the density factor – Gore owns a huge estate, so how much energy is consumed per foot (or meter, for you metric types :)?  Possibly less than the avg. American?

It’s really too bad because An Inconvenient Truth’s thesis isn’t simply about reducing energy consumption.  The purpose is to bring attention to CO2’s damaging effects.  If we were all consuming twice as much energy but was all solar sourced, then we probably wouldn’t be in a climate crisis (I’m not saying we wouldn’t be having a different problem, either :).

No, I have no affiliation to Gore and his policies.  The Tennessee Center’s inconvenient truth is that they lost a potential reader.

I was picking up some hardware from the back-alley stores of Akihabara when I spotted these odd looking red lights flashing digits like a roadside speedometer you might see in America. Closer examination revealed they were measuring loudness in the area – the top was measuring volume, the bottom I think was measuring some sort of vibration level (can’t read the characters in this low-res photo), as in when heavy trucks drive by. Impressive was that these were being recorded in real-time. My guess is there have been an increasing number of complaints about noise levels. Where the authorities should really be focusing to address the noise pollution is of course the campaign trucks.

At any rate, give your lungs a good exercise if you ever come across these – it’s amusing to see how loud one can get.

man … oh man …. oh man …
you have to listen all the way through.

Rove’s re-election strategy was elegantly simple: Scare the bejesus out of Jesusland. Faggots are headed your way! Satanic Muslims are hiding everywhere! That’s all it took to get Jesusland to do the job. Intellectual conservatives like the National Review staff are flattering themselves if they honestly believe Jesusland cares about conservative thought. The “reality-based” folks are learning that Jesusland doesn’t even care about jobs or the economy. In Jesusland, it’s all the will of Jesus. No job? No money? Daughter got her clit pierced? Jesus is just fucking with you again, testing your faith. Got the cancer? Oh well. Soon you’ll be with Jesus. Reality is no match for a mystical world in which an all-powerful god is constantly toying with every detail of your mundane life, just to see what you’ll do about it. Keep praying and always keep your eye out for homosexuals and terrorists, and you will eventually be rewarded … all you have to do is die, and then it’s SuperJesusLand, where you will be a ghost floating in a magic cloud with all the other ghosts from Jesusland, with Jesus Himself presiding over an Eternal Church Service.

The Day the Enlightenment Went Out

Which raises the question: Can a people that believes more fervently in the Virgin Birth than in evolution still be called an Enlightened nation?

America, the first real democracy in history, was a product of Enlightenment values – critical intelligence, tolerance, respect for evidence, a regard for the secular sciences. Though the founders differed on many things, they shared these values of what was then modernity. They addressed “a candid world,” as they wrote in the Declaration of Independence, out of “a decent respect for the opinions of mankind.” Respect for evidence seems not to pertain any more, when a poll taken just before the elections showed that 75 percent of Mr. Bush’s supporters believe Iraq either worked closely with Al Qaeda or was directly involved in the attacks of 9/11.

The secular states of modern Europe do not understand the fundamentalism of the American electorate. It is not what they had experienced from this country in the past. In fact, we now resemble those nations less than we do our putative enemies.

Where else do we find fundamentalist zeal, a rage at secularity, religious intolerance, fear of and hatred for modernity? Not in France or Britain or Germany or Italy or Spain. We find it in the Muslim world, in Al Qaeda, in Saddam Hussein’s Sunni loyalists. Americans wonder that the rest of the world thinks us so dangerous, so single-minded, so impervious to international appeals. They fear jihad, no matter whose zeal is being expressed.

It is often observed that enemies come to resemble each other. We torture the torturers, we call our God better than theirs – as one American general put it, in words that the president has not repudiated.

Has 200 years of history shown that the American ‘experiment’ is a failure?

Gays have no rights? Christians fundamentalists should have no rights, we sure don’t need anymore of them procreating. The traditional institution of marriage (between a man and woman) is so ludicrously corrupt in the US anyway, what level of hypocrisy does it take for these idiots to claim that they are somehow protecting marriage by denying gays the right to sign prenups, have shotgun weddings in vegas, get divorced, and argue over who gets the beamer?

Think the war in Iraq was right and just? Think the war on terror is effective? Do you understand that this non-sense has been going on since the middle ages? Is killing people a good way to make friends and earn respect? Has Israel achieved anything using the same tactics? The USA isn’t an innocent victim.

For all the Bible Belt talk about family values, it is the people from Kerry’s home state, along with their neighbors in the Northeast corridor, who live these values. Indeed, it is the “blue” states, led led by Massachusetts and Connecticut, that have been willing to invest more money over time to foster the reality of what it means to leave no children behind. And they have been among the nation’s leaders in promoting a living wage as their goal in public employment. The money they have invested in their future is known more popularly as taxes; these so-called liberal people see that money is their investment to help insure a compassionate, humane society. Family values are much more likely to be found in the states mistakenly called out-of-the-mainstream liberal. By their behavior you can know them as the true conservatives. They are showing how to conserve family life through the way they live their family values.

Booya.

Not to get all political on you, but really: The speed with which the US lost global goodwill and sympathy from 9/11 to the present day may be unparalleled in human history. Nobody has lost that much goodwill so quickly before.

From The Ludologist. Good comments follow too.